Friday, January 27, 2012

Occupation

oc·cu·pa·tion

a person's usual or principal work or business, especially as a means of earning a living; vocation: Her occupation was dentistry.

any activity in which a person is engaged.

possession, settlement, or use of land or property.

the act of occupying.

the state of being occupied.

Revolution was brewing in America’s factories in the 1930s, as autoworkers and other blue-collar workers fought for the right to be represented by unions.

The Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37 was fought and won in Flint. Historian Sidney Fine calls it "the most significant American labor conflict in the 20th century."

The strike hit GM factories nationwide, but attention was focused on the Fisher Body No. 1 factory on S. Saginaw Street and the smaller Fisher Body No. 2 on Chevrolet Avenue, and later at the nearby Chevrolet Plant 4.

"Money wasn’t involved," said Robert Keith, 91, of Grand Blanc Township, who was a sit-down striker at Fisher No. 1 and is one of the charter members of UAW Local 581. "We didn’t talk at all about money."

He said the strike was more about working conditions, lack of job security, treatment and about piecework – paying workers based on the number of parts made – than about wages.

He explained how the company would set a piecework rate. When workers found ways to do the job quicker to earn more, the company would set the pay rate lower.

Keith said employees had no job security before the union. Factory workers of the 1920s and ’30s were like migrant farm laborers, going from place to place to find work, he said. After summer layoffs, management hired back only those whom they wanted.

"If you was 35 years old, you had a hard time getting back in there, unless you had pull with somebody," said Keith, whose wife, Florence, also worked at Fisher No. 1 and was one of the first women there to join the union.

The sit-down in Flint began on Dec. 29, 1936. The UAW had planned to go on strike against General Motors here, but workers at Fisher No. 1 heard that GM was removing dies as a suspected countermove. The union seized the opportunity to call the strike. Earlier that day, Fisher No. 2 went on strike after management transferred three inspectors who refused to quit the union.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors. ...

Executives at other corporations report similar internal pressures. This system may not be pretty, they argue, but a radical overhaul would slow innovation. Customers want amazing new electronics delivered every
year.

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.” ...

“The only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do
things more efficiently or cheaper,” said an executive at one company
that helped bring the iPad to market. “And then they’ll come back the
next year, and force a 10 percent price cut.”

In January 2010, workers at a Chinese factory owned by Wintek, an Apple
manufacturing partner, went on strike over a variety of issues,
including widespread rumors that workers were being exposed to toxins.
Investigations by news organizations revealed that over a hundred
employees had been injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause
nerve damage and paralysis.

Employees said they had been ordered to use n-hexane to clean iPhone
screens because it evaporated almost three times as fast as rubbing
alcohol. Faster evaporation meant workers could clean more screens each
minute.

Apple commented on the Wintek injuries a year later. In its supplier
responsibility report, Apple said it had “required Wintek to stop using
n-hexane” and that “Apple has verified that all affected workers have
been treated successfully, and we continue to monitor their medical
reports until full recuperation.” Apple also said it required Wintek to
fix the ventilation system.

That same month, a New York Times reporter interviewed a dozen injured Wintek workers who said they had never been contacted
by Apple or its intermediaries, and that Wintek had pressured them to
resign and take cash settlements that would absolve the company of
liability. After those interviews, Wintek pledged to provide more
compensation to the injured workers and Apple sent a representative to
speak with some of them.

“You can set all the rules you want, but they’re meaningless if you
don’t give suppliers enough profit to treat workers well,” said one
former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier
responsibility group. “If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to
cut safety.”

And so, in many ways, have most of us, and not just by buying what
Steve Jobs was selling—the products and the feeling of being a better
(smarter, hipper, more creative) person because of them. Through his
enchanting theatrics, exquisite marketing, and seductive packaging, Jobs
was able to convince millions of people all over the world that the
provenance of Apple devices was magical, too. Machina ex deo. How
else to explain their popularity despite the fact that they actually
come from places that do not make us better people for owning them, the
factories in China where more than a dozen young workers have committed
suicide, some by jumping; where workers must now sign a pledge stating
that they will not try to kill themselves but if they do, their families
will not seek damages; where three people died and fifteen were injured
when dust exploded; where 137 people exposed to a toxic chemical
suffered nerve damage; where Apple offers injured workers no recompense;
where workers, some as young as thirteen, according to an article in The New York Times,
typically put in seventy-two-hour weeks, sometimes more, with minimal
compensation, few breaks, and little food, to satisfy the overwhelming
demand generated by the theatrics, the marketing, the packaging, the
consummate engineering, and the herd instinct; and where, it goes
without saying, the people who make all this cannot afford to buy it?

While
it may be convenient to suppose that Apple is no different than any
other company doing business in China—which is as fine a textbook
example of a logical fallacy as there is—in reality, it is worse.
According to a study reported by Bloomberg News last January, Apple
ranked at the very bottom of twenty-nine global tech firms “in terms of
responsiveness and transparency to health and environmental concerns in
China.” Yet walking into the Foxconn factory, where people routinely
work six days a week, from early in the morning till late at night
standing in enforced silence, Steve Jobs might have entered his biggest
reality distortion field of all. “You go into this place and it’s a
factory but, my gosh, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and
hospitals and swimming pools,” he said after being queried by reporters
about working conditions there shortly after a spate of suicides. “For a
factory, it’s pretty nice.”

So, unless Obama somewhat surprisingly does not become the next President of
the United States, the Democratic Party will experience its first changing of
the guard since the late 1980's. What differences will be in store? Here are the
three major changes I expect:

Cultural Shift: Out with Bubbas, up with Creatives: There should be a
major cultural shift in the party, where the southern Dems and Liebercrat elite
will be largely replaced by rising creative class types. Obama has all the
markers of a creative class background, from his community organizing, to his
Unitarianism, to being an academic, to living in Hyde Park to shopping at Whole
Foods and drinking PBR. These will be the type of people running the Democratic Party now, and
it will be a big cultural shift from the white working class focus of earlier
decades. Given the demographics of the blogosphere, in all likelihood, this is a
socioeconomic and cultural demographic into which you fit. Culturally, the
Democratic Party will feel pretty normal to netroots types. It will consistently
send out cultural signals designed to appeal primarily to the creative class
instead of rich donors and the white working class.

Policy Shift: Out with the DLC, up with technocratic wonks. My sense
of Obama and his policy team is overwhelmingly one of technocratic, generally
less overtly ideological professional policy types. We should see a shift from
the more corporate and triangulating policy focus of the Democratic Party in the
1990's, and see it replaced by whatever centrist, technocratic policies are the
wonkish flavor of the month. It will all be very oriented toward think-tank and
academic types, and be reminiscent of policy making in the 1950's, 1960's and
1970's. A sort of "technocratic liberalism" that will be less infuriating than
DLC style governance, but still not overtly leftist.

Coalition reorganization: Out with party silos, in with squishy
goo-goos. In addition to a shift in culture and policy focus, I also expect
a different approach to coalition building. A long-standing Democrats approach
of transactional politics with different issue and demographic silos in the
party shift toward an emphasis on good government (goo goo) approaches. We will
see lots of emphasis on non-partisanship, ethics reform, election reform instead
of on, say, placating labor unions, environment groups, and the LGBT community
by throwing each of these groups a policy bone or two. Now, the focus will be on
broad, squishy fixes that are designed to appeal to several groups at once. George
Lakoff wrote about this a couple months ago.

Many of Obama’s liberal allies have been disillusioned, too. When Steve
Jobs last met the President, in February, 2011, he was most annoyed by
Obama’s pessimism—he seemed to dismiss every idea Jobs proffered. “The
president is very smart,” Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson.
“But he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done. It
infuriates me.”

As further developed through a labyrinthine analysis
that drew on social
psychology, brain chemistry, and human transaction theory, Ganz’s
model posited that the root of the “values” problem was essentially
emotional. “Values are not just concepts, they’re feelings,” Ganz
explained knowingly. “That’s what dropped out of Democratic politics
sometime in the ‘70s or ‘80s.” Thus, the Obama campaign presented
itself as a social movement that was more sentimental than political,
pushing gauzy “values,” like “hope” and “change,” while leaving policy
concerns to the wonks. Yet the successful movements of the past had
more than values; they had specific goals. The civil rights movement’s
eyes were on the prizes of desegregation and voting rights. Cesar
Chavez’s United Farm Workers,
where Ganz learned so much about political organizing, also had its
emotive side—summed up in its slogan, “Si, Se Puede,” which the Obama
campaign directly appropriated in translation, “Yes, We Can”—but it
also had in mind the recognition of organized fieldhands and the
negotiation of fair contracts involving wages.
The point of the Obama campaign-as-movement was conceived differently:
exciting people with the thrill of empowerment, and collective
self-empowerment, by electing to the White House a community organizer
who believed in “hope” and “change.” Why electing Obama was
imperative required no explanation among the faithful; it was enough to
get the spirit, share the spirit, and revel in the candidate’s
essence, which, by definition, no other candidate possessed. The leader
was the program. ...

Ganz’s projection of the Obama presidency gained its prestige from the
hallowed memories of the civil rights and farmworker union movements,
imbued with high moral as well as political purposes. He posed it
against the threadbare, craven horse-trading and maneuvering of parties
and all previous presidential politics, which Ganz believes
were “practiced to maintain, rather than change, the status quo.” The
Obama experiment, a movement that arose from the grassroots apart from
the Democratic Party, would usher in a purer moral and more effective
leadership to the White House. Obama would not merely alter government
policy but also transform the very sum and substance of the political
system. ...

According to Ganz’s theory and practice of
the Obama movement, policies and politics were slighted in favor of
feelings and values. Supposedly,
these emotive spurs would bind participants in a new activist
community, devoted to the collective good and not personal
gratification, and dedicated to advancing the uniquely inspiring
political leader who had sprung from the reliable ranks of community
organizing, and not from the precincts of compromised “transactional”
politics. ...

Obama in office upheld the community organizers’
post-partisan credo, trying to bring together opposing forces and
finding common ground, in part under the pressure of the organizer’s own
reasonableness. But that was not how it worked in Washington during
the past two years; nor had it worked that way for 20 years. A ruthless
and right-wing Republican Party spurned talk of common ground as a sign
of weakness, and did everything it could to ensure that Obama’s
presidency would fail. But oblivious to the long-standing internal
dynamics of the Republican Party, Obama continued to vaunt his brand of
“post-partisanship.”

There is a persistent anxiety within the movement of
being “co-opted” by potential allies—the word crops up frequently in
conversation. The country’s largest labor unions were among the earliest
supporters of Occupy Wall Street, donating money and space. The
movement’s two most impressive marches by far—in Foley Square on October
5 and November 17—were largely made possible by the teachers,
communications workers, and hospital employees who showed up in
significant numbers at their unions’ behest.

Yet a wariness of
organized labor’s hierarchical structures and establishment contacts has
prevented a deeper alliance. Overtures from left-leaning factions of
the Democratic Party have been met with similar resistance. The open
nature of the general assemblies and working groups, it was feared, made
the movement vulnerable to takeover by such groups, though there seemed
to be little evidence that any such takeover was in the works. Many
demonstrators argued, in effect, that the integrity of the fledgling
anarchist experiment must be protected at all costs.

Occupy Wall
Street had succeeded, after all, where the “old left”—afraid of damaging
Obama, and meekly plodding on—had failed in recent years. Traditional
liberals, its members said, didn’t understand the particular
generational impulses behind the movement, its new way of protesting
and—here was the central point—of making people feel listened to and
heard. Still, despite the large number of sympathizers it had gained,
the movement, after being expelled from Zuccotti Park, seemed in danger
of remaining more or less what it had been in September—a group of
freelance activists with no reliable power base or allies. ...

As I spoke, I could sense the impatience of my listeners. I wasn’t
getting the point. Any such demand would turn them into supplicants; its
very utterance implied a surrender to the state that went against
Occupy Wall Street’s principles. Katie maintained that Occupy Wall
Street didn’t yet have “a broad enough base” to make such a demand with
any reasonable expectation that it could be met. And Amin said, “It
doesn’t matter what particular laws you pass. We’re not about laws.”
They saw themselves as a counterculture; and to continue to survive as
such they had to remain uncontaminated by the culture they opposed. ...

Organizers described Occupy Wall Street as “a way of being,” of “sharing
your life together in assembly.” To participate fully in its process of
“horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based”
democracy, you had to make the movement a central part of your
existence. For many, this posed an insurmountable problem. A social
worker and single mother with little free time told me that she had
given up trying to join Occupy Wall Street because she couldn’t figure
out how to do so “without hanging out with them all the time.” The
ambitions of the core group of activists were more cultural than
political, in the sense that they sought to influence the way people
think about their lives. “Ours is a transformational movement,” Amin
told me with a solemn air. Transformation had to occur face to face;
what it offered, especially to the young, was an antidote to the empty
gaze of the screen.

Occupation - The texture of a life. A job. A way to get a paycheck. That which fills your thoughts and guides your actions. Being in a place. Having colonized or taken control of something, be it a place or a mentality. The condition of being colonized.

There are many ways to be occupied, many modes of occupation. The occupations that succeed are those that are material - I've got this space and I am getting these goods in exchange for occupying this space, perhaps as a worker, perhaps as a striker. The Flint Strike at Fisher No. 1 is perhaps the finest example of occupation in US working class history. The occupation of the various electronics manufacturing plants in China by multinational corporations, such as Apple, is a no-less profound moment in workers' history.

That occupation would not be possible without the (pre)occupation of consumers - almost all in the developed world - with having the coolest, swoopiest, hippest gadgets they can get their hands on, exemplified by the obsession (the cultural and psychological occupation) with owning Apple.

And I watch Occupy Wall Street recapitulate the failures of the movement that put The Precious in office, occupied as they are with transformation rather than achieving immediate, material goals that will persuade the majority of the 99% who only see dirty fucking hippies begging for handouts while they labor on at their thankless jobs.

3 comments:

A ruthless and right-wing Republican Party spurned talk of common ground as a sign of weakness, and did everything it could to ensure that Obama’s presidency would fail. But oblivious to the long-standing internal dynamics of the Republican Party, Obama continued to vaunt his brand of “post-partisanship.”

This is the incredible bright Obama who is somehow endlessly, endlessly fooled by those mean Repugs excuse used to hide the fact the man doesn't know or care what comes out of his mouth in public. He reads what BS they feed the teleprompter and goes off to shoot some hoops.

He certainly seems to like the Repugs he's constantly courting a heck of alot more than his supposed party, who he is constantly scolding. ( I love how Obama talks about the US public's need to eat peas and tighten belts, as he goes off to another vacation. Cute. And who else but Obama could have the gaul to wag a finger at actual Freedom Riders, telling them to take off thier bedroom slippers...priceless! ) Indeed, Obama likes parties,just not political ones.

I really don't see a difference between the obots /whole food nation and OWS...it's the same people. ( It's actually a lifestyle, not a movement.) Via OWS, they get to mind wipe thier hero's utter complicity with Wall St and they love that. Suddenly they can be angry again!Yippee!

It is determinedly anti-political, anti-working class, and anti-transactional, preferring morality to effectiveness, righteousness to power. Thus the people who can gaze upon hucksters like Steve Jobs and The Precious and see saviors instead of snake-oil salesmen.

Very well put.

If( when?) Obama is declared President for life, they will be fine with that.

Apple ranked at the very bottom of twenty-nine global tech firms “in terms of responsiveness and transparency to health and environmental concerns in China.”

I have to disagree with you about Obot = OWS. Lambert & Riverdaughter are certainly not Obama supporters by any measure, but are articulate and impassioned OWS activists. My brothers are Obama supporters and OWS activists. It's a mix.

I'm also not against OWS. Quite the contrary; I think there needs to be more of this. What I'm driving at is the way in which OWS is making itself ridiculous because it won't learn the lessons of 2008. Part of it is unavoidable because these are the ingrained habits and biases of our tribe, especially the political newcomers. That is the political problem I've been pounding at since the 2006 bi-elections, what Somerby sums up as The Big Stupid, that afflicts the tribe.

Certainly Lambert & Riverdaughter are not Obama supporters.But most of the 08 Obama voters I know, seamlessly went for OWS, it hits all our usual hot buttons ....and certainly when I visited my local OWS, it was very much an '08 Obot atmosphere. If OWS lead to something it would be great. Certainly a legit movement is vastly needed.I will look forward to your thoughts about it.

I just see those who crafted Obama also behind OWS. My local Dem/Obama party was on the scene almost immediately and running alot. My Dem mayor was most welcoming. It basically seemed a New Dem apparatus to me. Something to control and contain the left side of the Dem party. I would love to not think that.

What I'm driving at is the way in which OWS is making itself ridiculous because it won't learn the lessons of 2008. Part of it is unavoidable because these are the ingrained habits and biases of our tribe...

This goes much further back than '06 or '08 of course. I have been voting 40 years, and in that time all I have seen the tribe do is get an ever worse case of " The Big Stupid"....in other words, walk further and further away from the working class. Frankly, it's depressing.